Parental Conflict – Alienating a Child

“At this point in [the child’s] life, [its] future should lie ahead of [it] full of promise and potential. But I fear for [the child] and for [its] future,” she said in a decision issued last year.

“I fear for [the child] for one simple reason. [Its] parents … have one of the worst parental relationships I have seen in 22 years of experience in the field of family law.”

The father may not be perfect but the headline “Kiwi mum battles to keep child” substanially discounts the mothers contribution to the alienation of this child from the father. To me the headline shows a clear bais – man is evil, woman is victim menatlity of the reporter.

The court was told that the child maintained a consistently negative view of the father and continually told a lawyer and a court-appointed doctor that it did not want to visit the father.

“A common theme for [the child] is to describe [its] father as evil, and emphatically state that [it] hates [the father].”

Judge Rogers said she found that the child was “alienated”. The court-appointed child psychologist defined this as “a child who expresses, freely and persistently, unreasonable negative feelings and beliefs towards a parent that are significantly disproportionate to the child’s actual experience with that parent”.

The mother has denied she ever engaged in intentional or unintentional “alienating behaviour”.

Interesting denial by the mother, given the child has been in her care and is so young.

As to Mark Henaghan’s comments about money dragging out Family Court proceedings – surely the same logic must apply to one party (Mum) being granted endless legal aid compared to the father having to pay for his lawyer or self represent.

7 Responses to “Parental Conflict – Alienating a Child”

Thanks Scrap, pure thievery, the familycaught at its very best, when the public cannot be watching.

Legal workers know that there is a conflict of interest between serving families and just plain helping themselves. (The Lord helps those, who help themselves!)

“Best interests of the child” is just a marketing gimmick, which sounds good to lots of people, who don’t stop to think it through. As parents and children have long term interests largely in common, there isn’t really much conflict of interest between children and their parents.

However, there is a huge conflict of interest between legal workers (“judges” and lawyers) as they don’t have any valuable long term relationship with the family. “Suck hard while your teeth are in the wallet” is their method to get the very highest financial returns. It only takes one crooked legal worker, say “judge” or lawyer for either party, to be able to spin it out longer. Then they all pocket the ill gotten gains, even if they weren’t the actual manipulator.

Surely, in the parental relationship referred to, the parental relationship most probably would have been better, if the legal workers had not pitted the parental wallets against each other.

The story seems strangely reminiscent of the Jaydon Hedly / Kay Skelton thievery and also the many multiple ongoing sex abuse allegations milked by the familycaught “judges” and lawyers.

Sacrificing privacy would be a small price to pay, to get a familycaught that worked according to the legislation!

Child protection is more important than secrecy that hides thievery, again and again and again.

If the familycaught “judges” operated with integrity, then there would only be a need for about 30 such judges. They know this and spin out tiny disputes into long drawn out and way overpriced. Then they ask the Gowernment to appoint more “judges”! And, we are dumb enough to do it!

If the decisions of the “judges” set incentives to constructive behaviour by parents, then parents would realise that dishonest games would not be supported by destructive judgements. Parents would quickly learn to behave sensibly toward each other.

I had to laugh at “more than 1000 pages of evidence”. The familycaught totally mixes up sympathy and evidence. Decisions are based on personal likes, custodial/non custodial status, showing high wealth reduces your chances significantly, evidence is just an archaic name for malpractice.

If we don’t fight to force familycaught to do the job set out in legislation, it will slide even further backwards, towards the situation in UK.

If we fight, then maybe we can aspire to copy Australia, where I believe that all men are taking a greater interest in family breakup issues?

The only possible way that Government can manage the conflict of interest between the legal workers and families, is to allow families to choose the judge, on reputation and price. This application of market forces would sort out this thievery, in 6 to 9 months maximum.

The familycaught has had 30 years to prove itself. It is well past time that we evaluated its performance and made hard constructive decisions. Every single promised improvement, has actually been followed by further backsliding and increased featherbedding. More of anything doesn’t necessarily mean better. I would venture to say that history shows that much less familycaught, would serve families much better.

In the same way that I suggest judges should be giving parents constructive incentives, our society must show judges that we only want to pay them for constructive performance.

Hearing 7 successive sex abuse allegations is simple thievery, not being a constructive familycaught judge, pure relationship vandalism. Only by making judges performances readily publicly visible and accountable, can we enforce a requirement for constructive performance onto our judges.

Parental alienation is child abuse…..It’s that simple. The Family court lawyers, court appointed writers, and court judges who have prolonged this case and profited from this corruption and perversion of justice are the ones who are responsible for the abuse of this child. “In the best interest of the child” what a joke! It’s in the best interest of any child to have a meaningful relationship with BOTH parents.
Murray a very well written reply, as always, I would love the opportunity to talk to you personally sometime. Boy do I have a story to tell!

Alienation… hmmm…
Do you think that ordering children to stop calling their father was parental alienation. This is in my parenting order. The judge decided that it was wrong for my kids to tell me about the abuse they were suffering as I had informed cyfs and police (who did virtually nothing mainly because the log had been written down incorrectly). He also ordered them not to see/hear from me for over a month. My kids have never been without me for that length of time. I’d call that child abuse myself. But of course it’s the NZ family court. They know what’s “in the best interests”.
It won’t be long before self immolation outside court buildings is seen in New Zealand; not that it will be reported like that (I can see the title if it were printed “deadbeat dad tries to makes a scene and upsets his children”…)

It was hard to know where to ask for advice, but this forum summed up what my partner and I have to deal with on a daily basis.

My parner has over 50% care of his 9year old son (althhough the biologically mother thinks she is the major care giver).He has arranged his work around making sure he has quality time with his son. He picks him up from school, drops him to school, takes him to all his sports practices and is there for every game. It sounds to good to be true but he really is there for his son always.

In comparison, the biological mother never picks the son up from school or is at anything of her son’s. Her parents care for him while she works and he has told us he drives 45mins to get home from his grandparents each night he is with her at 8:30pm at night. She lives only 2km from the school.

The biological mother puts down my partner to his son every chance she gets and blames any disruptions on my partner. This attitude is reflected is the way my partner’s son behaves when he first comes into our home. Once he is settled and given love he opens up and he loves the time with us.

We ALWAYS try to do everything we can to make things easy on my partners son but when is enough enough? I was wondering if anyone has had experience with mothers agreeing to letting children going on holiday (in writing) then withdrawing the agreement 4 days out because we will not allow her to have the passport on our return?

We took my partner’s son away on a family holiday overseas last year and she did the same thing but not so extreme. This time she has said she will get a court order if we don’t do everything she says. We have said she has already agreed to the dates to Australia, she doesn’t seem to care. We were supposed to leave on Tuesday evening.

Help PLEASE anyone?

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